- Wealthy tourists are shipping supercars to London and treating parking fines like optional fees.
- Qatar-registered vehicles alone received 2,570 Westminster tickets last year.
- The real problem is enforcement, as foreign owners can be extraordinarily difficult to pursue.
If you can afford to spend $68,000 flying your Ferrari halfway around the world for summer vacation, a $200 parking ticket probably isn’t keeping you awake at night. That appears to be part of London’s increasingly expensive problem with foreign-registered supercars. Wealthy visitors are parking wherever they please, collecting tickets, and, in many cases, apparently leaving the country without paying them.
According to a new Wall Street Journal report, London’s wealthier neighborhoods fill up each summer with Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens, Bentleys and other high-end machinery carrying plates from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere in the Gulf. The cars themselves aren’t really the problem; where their owners park them, and how little they appear to care about the tickets, is.
Read: Driver’s $3K Tow For Brief Parking Explodes Into $12K Nightmare
Drivers reportedly occupy loading zones, bus stops, taxi stands and areas marked by double yellow lines. Harrods is apparently ground zero. The report noted everything from a Qatari Land Rover Defender to a roughly $400,000 Ferrari Purosangue illegally parked nearby. Tickets typically cost around $150 to $215. That’s not much, but Westminster’s numbers suggest issuing one and actually collecting the money are two very different things.
Drivers reportedly occupy loading zones, bus stops, taxi stands and areas marked by double yellow lines. Harrods is apparently ground zero. The report noted everything from a Qatari Land Rover Defender P400 to a $400,000 Ferrari Purosangue illegally parked nearby. The Ferrari already had a fresh ticket under its windshield wiper when its driver returned. Asked whether he intended to pay it, he replied, “Of course,” before accelerating away with the citation still attached. Tickets typically cost around $150 to $215. That’s not much, but Westminster’s numbers suggest issuing one and actually collecting the money are two very different things.
Between 2018 and 2022, Westminster tried to collect on 13,423 tickets issued to UAE-registered vehicles. Just 1 percent were paid, according to the WSJ. Last year, Qatar-registered vehicles received another 2,570 tickets in Westminster alone. In fact, Qatar topped every foreign country, ahead of much larger and considerably closer Germany and France. That’s especially remarkable considering Qatar has a population of roughly three million and sits about 4,000 miles (6,437 km) away. Four Gulf states collectively accounted for 41 percent of Westminster’s tickets issued to foreign vehicles that year.
The crux of the issue appears to come down to one fact. British authorities often can’t obtain the registered keeper’s address for vehicles from countries outside Europe. The UK government confirmed in December that vehicle-keeper information cannot be shared internationally for civil-debt enforcement. That said, councils can employ international collection agencies after vehicles leave Britain. This is where all the wealth comes into play, though.
Above The Law
The real gap between infraction and enforcement might be above the law. We don’t just mean that figuratively either. Several of these supercar owners are evidently flying their cars in and out of the area to the tune of around $34,000 each way. That means that the cars in question aren’t just owned by people who seemingly believe they’re too rich to ignore the issue, but that the cars in question are literally at times over the heads of those trying to enforce the rules.
There doesn’t appear to be an easy fix, either. Westminster says it enforces violations against overseas drivers like anyone else, while the UK government said late last year that it has no plans to give councils broader powers to seize vehicles simply because they’re tied to unpaid parking penalties. An official testimony from 2009 summed up the issue back then, saying “Effectively, foreign registered vehicles are immune from enforcement on congestion charging, parking and traffic regulation.” For now, it appears that nothing has changed.
